Sojourn to Honduras Sojourn to Healing: Why An Herbalist's View Matters More Today Than Ever Before

By Beverly Oliver

Usha Village, an alternative medicine and natural healing center in Honduras, Central America, is the setting for Sojourn to Honduras Sojourn to Healing: Why An Herbalist's View Matters More Today Than Ever Before. This revised, 2nd edition offers a view of proven and effective alternative healing experienced by Dr. Sebi, a man who knows firsthand the benefits of such a method. Dr. Sebi, a pathologist and herbal medicine specialist for more than 35 years, welcomed author Beverly Oliver to Usha Village, land replete with a natural hot spring, to share health advice, anecdotes about the food and health connection, and his personal and professional journey with alternative healing and medicine. Sojourn to Honduras Sojourn to Healing explores Dr. Sebi's views on AIDS, diabetes, cancer, his success in treating these diseases and the social and political roadblocks he's faced while doing so. Chapter and Section titles include: Usha Village, Cosmic Thermal; The Healer Makes a Case for the Natural; Alfredo Bowman Is Dr. Sebi the Healer; Food and the African Gene; They Know I Cure AIDS; Reflections on the Elderly and the Young at Usha Village; Healing Hot Spring

• Language: English
• Publisher: Beverly Oliver
• Release date: Nov 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311245298

Beverly Oliver

Beverly Oliver, a writer and creative artist in Los Angeles, began her career as a public affairs producer at Howard University radio station WHUR-FM, 96.3, the location of her first interview with pathologist and herbal medicine specialist Dr. Sebi. Since that time she has visited Usha Village in Honduras, Central America three times to speak with Dr. Sebi about natural healing. She is currently writing a nonfiction book she and Dr. Sebi started before his death in 2016. The tentative release date of Dr. Sebi Speaks of Dembali is Winter 2020.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

In 2005, retired herbalist Dr. Sebi had reached the age of 72, but I noticed the vitality of a 5-year-old at his kindergarten show and tell. On one of our daily rides around the town of La Ceiba, Honduras, he suddenly behaved in the most incredible way. I watched him leap from his truck, leave it idling in traffic, and dash his limber legs to an open field to inspect a plant that caught his eye. He examined his diamond-in-the-rough in what appeared to be widespread patches of weeds. Drivers in traffic must have been familiar with his hyperactivity. No car or truck horns blew at Dr. Sebi's sitting vehicle and passengers in waiting.

Then there was the time we were talking about his thin body, his vegetarianism and his physical strength. His high energies caught me off guard, again. With deliberate speed, he dropped his kneecaps to the stone floor of his hut without a cushion except the khaki pants he wore. When he stood up with a ballet dancer's grace and ease, I witnessed firsthand his dedication to a vegetarian's life and his calcium-rich sea moss and bladderwrack herbs. The senior citizen with knees as strong and hard as cement demonstrated unabashed compliance with his longstanding credo, Herbs are for the healing of the nation.

Most days and evenings we talked in Dr. Sebi's large two-room round hut, a contemporary spin on a traditional African home—pale green, made of mud, and topped with a metal corrugated roof shaped like an upside down cone. It stood on the manicured mango-covered grounds of Usha Village, his healing center in Agua Caliente, a village lying at the foot of a mountain high rainforest, and about 24 miles east of La Ceiba.

His hut didn't resemble makeshift living quarters you see in television ads for saving impoverished children around the world. But it still stood simply furnished, even with the 42-inch flat screen television on the wooden stand that faced the largest piece of furniture in the hut, his king-sized bed. An African mask and two framed pictures of African art draped the walls, the lone mask, on guard it seemed, resting right above the head of the bed.

A futon with pillows and flat wood arms offered a comfortable place to sit while I listened to Dr. Sebi (SAY-BEE, ever wandering traveler). He set it across from his bed. And every morning after settling in it, my hosts served me the best cups of natural mint tea that I've ever tasted, courtesy of leaves plucked straight from bushes at Usha Village.

We talked from sunrise to sunset every day for seven days in November 2005, days when winter mornings in Honduras, Central America felt like sweltering August afternoons in New York City. Sunny or overcast, it didn't matter. The heat endured. Not long after I arrived, my hot comb straightened hair recoiled into two thick double-strand braids that I wore each day. After feeling somewhat disappointed the press didn't hold, I realized the new style suited talks of the natural in Dr. Sebi's tropical home far better than straightened tresses.

But before I get ahead of myself, let me share with you why I journeyed to Honduras and why the trip became a personal crusade to join the global food and health revolution. It's a revolution steeped in debates about GMOs, organic versus nonorganic and whether food is nutritious or comfort.

Look no farther than your dinner plate for the birthplace of disease. That's Dr. Sebi's position. What he has advocated for 30 years runs counter to organic and nonorganic food trends. Rather than recommend organic foods—some of which are starch-based and acidic—he advises a return to diets of natural, alkaline food, food that nourishes the human body, naturally energized food that prevents and minimizes the onslaught of disease. Living the first 30 years of his life with impotence, asthma and obesity, Dr. Sebi knows a thing or two about the benefits of such a change.

I felt his knowledge and contributions in the field of herbs, nutrition and natural healing deserved greater exposure. Sojourn to Honduras, Sojourn to Healing represents that effort, and as a springboard for understanding why Dr. Sebi's prescriptions for healing matter more today than ever before, I offer a brief sketch of my own family's experiences with diet and disease.

I suffered with asthma between the ages of 7 and 17. For 10 years, wheezes trailed me from my home in Southeast Washington, D.C., all the way downtown to Group Health Association, my family's health care provider. But somehow I managed to sing in the junior choir at Little Ark Baptist Church.

Car rides to church, by way of the Anacostia Bridge, always sparked a rhythmical singsong. I'd sing water! wa-ter! wa-ter! while I watched waves ripple and fold against the stony edge of the Anacostia River—a fun respite from the concrete at Ketcham Elementary's playground. But crossing the river to go to the doctor, with little oxygen in my lungs to allow even the slightest whisper, I looked out the car's window and wheezed at the water below the bridge. I couldn't sing down to it and I wondered if it was as sad as I was because I couldn't. Short breaths and glassy eyes carried me over the wavelets to Group Health.

Once over the bridge, habitual nighttime rides past our country's historic landmarks diverted my attention from sickness to awe. The Potomac River shined across the Tidal Basin, while ground lights flooded the Bureau of Engraving, the Washington Monument and the White House, those colossal stones hovering above us and all a rock's throw from the clinic.

2121 Pennsylvania Avenue, Northwest. Group Health—GHA as it was identified on the rectangular green vertical sign attached to the side of the eight-story building—was practically my second home. Sometimes I arrived in my pajamas and robe, always escorted by my mother and usually by Yellow Cab, Capitol Cab, or the car of my father's best friend and co-worker Mr. Davidson. When I was old enough to take the bus alone, a task my mother insisted I learn posthaste to free up her time to take care of my baby sister Pam, the bus marked 34 Friendship Heights dropped me off at Group Health. I stepped through the revolving glass doors and landed in what must have been the most sanitized lobby on earth, a blend of alcohol and Pine Sol swirling in the air.

I found relief at Group Health, relief from sudden bouts of short breaths late at night or in the middle of the day. Most attacks struck at will in humidity-slapping summertime when air swelled with not only grass and dirt playful kids kicked up, but dog and cat dander as well. When a stray dog wandered within a few feet of me and my neighborhood playmates, I knew a trip downtown followed. I never knew exactly when my lungs would tighten. I just knew they would. I knew that like clockwork a doctor's cold stethoscope against my chest and back would confirm oxygen's struggle to enter and leave my body. Wheezes with every inhale, every exhale. Gurgling, bubbling phlegm squeezed and expanded in my chest and lungs like an accordion.

With some anxiety about these persistent attacks, hers and mine, my mother drilled me to cough up the gunk. Cough it up. Cough it up and spit it out, she'd race to tell me. I tried. Tried hard every time and every time a wad of slime slid back deeper in my chest.

As I think back on those days, I was spitting out thick saliva in my mouth instead of pulling the mucous from deep down in my chest, as deep as my diaphragm. If my mother had advised me to pull from there, like our choir director when she instructed us to pull air from that deep place, I'm sure I would have had more success pulling up and spitting out the gunk. Ma, if you're reading this from Heaven, you probably should have said, Hawk it. Hawk it up Beverly Ann. Hawk it up from the depths of your soul.

I received shots to help clear my lungs, as well as over-the-counter pills Primatene and Tedral, well-known and used asthma medications in the 1970s. They cleared my lungs like the hot coffee my mother used to give me, but just like the coffee, they kept me awake at night, and the wheezing always returned. Why didn't I use an inhaler? I never could coordinate inhaling with squirting medicine down my lungs, even after repeated instructions from my mother—her asthma more severe than mine, aggravated by a half a pack of Winston cigarettes she smoked every day.

By the time I was a junior in high school, I was on a weekly regimen of shots to desensitize my allergies. I must admit they helped. Allergic reactions to cats, dogs, ragweed, pollen and all other substances that bring asthmatics down ended—all except one.

If you know anything about southern cooking in the United States, you know it's starch-rich and creamy: black-eyed peas, cornbread, biscuits and gravy, white rice, grits, potatoes, macaroni and cheese. I love this food. Ate lots of it growing up in D.C., a tableful on Sundays, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter, cooked by southern parents and relatives from Orangeburg County, South Carolina.

On a typical Oliver plate you'd find fried pork chops, collard greens seasoned with cured ham, rice or mashed potatoes with brown gravy and onions, potato salad, biscuits and a nice cold glass of sweet ice tea. We'd expect candied yams for Thanksgiving, but my mother's sweet potato pie made rounds at the table as a regular Sunday dessert. Friday,

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